By DJ Bean | Comments Off on Jarome Iginla talking to other teams as Bruins face cap crunch

Peter Chiarelli told reporters in Philadelphia over the weekend that Jarome Iginla and agent Don Meehan would talk to other teams, a process that has seemingly begun given that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported the Wild contacted the soon-to-be free agent.

Free agency begins Tuesday, though teams have been able to talk to free-agents-to-be since last Wednesday. Iginla, who turns 37 Tuesday, figures to have plenty of potential suitors.

Chiarelli had also said that Iginla’s camp would stay in contact with the Bruins throughout the process, as the player wants to return to Boston but the Bruins have a little less than $6 million in salary cap space to sign a group of players that also includes Torey Krug and Reilly Smith.

If the Bruins are unable to bring Iginla back, there are plenty of contenders with ample cap space. The Lightning cleared cap space via trades Sunday night to give them somewhere around $13 million to spend, while the Wild have long to be believed to be spenders this offseason, either by signing Thomas Vanek or somebody else. Anaheim, Montreal and the Rangers are also among the contending teams with money to spend.

By DJ Bean | Comments Off on NHL salary cap set at $69 million for 2014-15 season

The NHL and NHL Players Association announced the payroll range for the 2014-15 season Friday, and the upper limit being lower than anticipated should make the Bruins’ offseason even more difficult than initially anticipated.

The lower limit is set at $51 million, with the upper limit set at $69 million. The upper limit was expected to be somewhere around $70 million, with recent speculation suggesting it could be higher. The Bruins, who have $67.58 million in cap space committed to next season, but can go as far as $4.027 million over the upper limit if Marc Savard is placed on long-term injured reserve, will now be hard-pressed to retain their unsigned players — Jarome Iginla chief among them — without shedding a current contract or two.

Reilly Smith and Torey Krug are both restricted free agents, as are Matt Bartkowski and Jordan Caron.

Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli held a conference with the media Monday to discuss the upcoming draft and free agency periods. Here are some of the takeaways:

– Chiarelli declined comment on negotiations with Jarome Iginla, saying only that the team wants the free agent forward to stay in Boston. The B’s are facing $4.75 million in penalties from cap overages from last season, most of which were from the easily reached incentives in Iginla’s one-year contract.

Chiarelli said the team was willing to face such a situation when they signed Iginla last offseason, but hinted the team might be less inclined to do a similar deal given that they have to account for raises to other players (Chiarelli mentionedDavid Krejci, but Carl Soderberg can also be included) in the 2015-16 season. So, connecting the dots, perhaps the Bruins are more willing to do a multi-year deal with Iginla rather than another one-year, incentive laden deal.

If that were to happen, Iginla’s cap hit would be higher than it was last season ($1.8 million), but the team won’t have to deal with cap penalties in future seasons.

– Such a scenario might make things tight for the Bruins. The salary cap has yet to be announced for the coming season, but when factoring in Marc Savard‘s long-term injury reserve space, the Bruins are probably looking at about $8 million to $10 million to sign a group of players that includes Iginla, Reilly Smith and Torey Krug, among others. Asked whether he felt he needed to move a contract in order to get his players signed, Chiarelli said he has multiple potential game plans for this offseason, some of which include trading a player off the current roster.

– Chiarelli said the Bruins are not planning on using a compliance buyout at this time.

– The Bruins will look at ‘lesser deals’ in free agency, according to Chiarelli. For both cap’s sake and chemistry’s sake, the team is not looking at bringing in a big-name free agent.

– Providence coach Bruce Cassidy is a potential candidate to take Geoff Ward‘s old job as one of Claude Julien‘s assistants, but Chiarelli noted the team might want to keep Cassidy in Providence because of how dependable he has been with developing younger players, especially on the back end.

– The number of new general managers has led to increased chatter among teams, Chiarelli said. He noted that the first-time managers seem eager to execute their plans, which has resulted in more teams talking.

As the Stanley Cup finals take place, the fact that the Bruins didn’t even reach the Eastern Conference finals after winning the Presidents’ Trophy further accentuates the failure that was their 2013-14 season. Here are the individual grades:

Bergeron had the type of season that led Twitter to be insufferable over his candidacy for a video game cover, so that’s a good thing, I guess. This was Bergeron’s second career 30-goal season, and the fact that he scored 30 goals given that he never, ever cheats offensively, was pretty insane. He likely would have had more points than his 62 points had his linemates been more consistent early on.

Bergeron had nine points (three goals, six assists) over the first eight games of the playoffs, but he failed to register a point in the last four games against the Canadiens.

He hit 30 goals in the regular season, and while that thrilled Bruins fans, that’s what they should have expected from him. It took him a bit to start scoring regularly, but once he hit his stride, the Bruins’ first line had perhaps its most consistent regular season since David Krejcibecame the team’s No. 1 center. The Bruins will want to bring him back, but there’s no telling whether Iginla is willing to go year-to-year given that it’s the only way the Bruins can capitalize cap-wise on his status as a player over 35 years old.

It’s probably too early take positives from the season and apply them going forward, but Soderberg showed he can be one of the league’s better third-liners since he was moved to center. Considering Bergeron and David Krejciaren’t going anywhere, that’s where Soderberg will remain. He has one year left on his deal with a $1.083 million cap hit. If the 28-year-old takes another step forward in his second full NHL season, he’ll be due a sizable raise.

Don’t confuse his midseason slump with a complete collapse; Smith was one of the Bruins’ best players in the postseason. With even a little consistency down the stretch in the regular season, this would be an A+.

The Bruins coveted Smith when it came time to talk trade with the Stars, and they planned on him being a steady third-liner for them this season, but he claimed the second-line right wing job and raced out to a team-leading 18 goals in his first 52 games. Of course, scoring just two goals over the final 30 games wasn’t exactly top-six material. How much of that can be attributed to his midseason illness that caused him to lose weight is unknown, but with more consistency Smith can expect to push for 30 goals going forward.

Lucic hit a goal-scoring rut in the middle of the season and he hit some of his opponents in the you-know-whats late in the season. That scoring slump saw Lucic score one goal over an 18-game stretch from Dec. 5 to Jan. 14, and without such a stretch Lucic could have pushed for 30 goals.

He had three concussions this season, but he still played in 72 regular-season games. Paille’s the type of player who could figure to stick around if the Bruins decide to revamp their fourth line, as he has the speed that’s allowed the B’s to move him up in the lineup at points in addition to his penalty-killing duties.

The Bruins’ bottom-six – particularly their fourth line — is supposed to be better than that of other teams, and it was a bad year for the Merlot Line. Campbell was a minus-3 in the Montreal series, with his line on the ice for the disastrous shift against Montreal’s fourth line in Game 7 that resulted in Dale Weise‘s first-period goal. The positive is that Campbell played all 82 games and 12 postseason games coming off a broken leg that ended last season in the Eastern Conference finals for him. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bruins will enter this offseason with 11 free agents (five unrestricted, six restricted). One of Boston’s biggest decisions over the coming months will be what to do with Jarome Iginla, who is set to hit the open market. Iginla tied for the team lead in goals with 30 and fit in perfectly with Boston’s first line of Milan Lucic and David Krejci.

However, concerns have been raised over both Iginla’s age (he will turn 37 on July 1) and the price that it would take to bring the future Hall of Famer back.

“The last time I talked to Jarome was right before Game 7 and I thought he was doing great. He just loves being in Boston,” McGuire said. “He really enjoyed his teammates, really enjoyed playing with David Krejci and Milan Lucic, so that’s No. 1. No. 2, I think that you can get him signed to a deal, and I think the Bruins probably want to get him signed to a deal. He did a really good job. There will be a marketplace for him, but I have to think he’ll want to stay in Boston.”

Another difficult decision this summer will revolve around the whether or not to bring back Shawn Thornton, who has been a mainstay on the Merlot line for seven season in Boston.

“A team like Calgary would definitely have interest [in Thornton]. You have to have a previous relationship with a player like Shawn to know his actual value to the organization, especially behind closed doors. So I think that’s something that plays to Shawn’s favor,” McGuire said. “But I would caution Shawn on this. He’s had a tremendous career. He’s made a lot out of nothing because he’s worked so hard to get there. … He’s a Bostonian.

“Even though he’s from Ontario and he’s played for a lot of other teams, he’s a Boston guy. He’s a Boston Bruin. That’s how he should be remembered. I just hope he wouldn’t do it as a short-term deal, because I don’t think he has more than another year left to play. I would hate to see him leave and not be remembered as Boston Bruin, because that’s what he is.”

Shawn Thornton‘s future with the Bruins is murky at best, as he was not told that he wouldn’t be re-signed Friday, but Peter Chiarelli did not tell him the team plans to retain him.

Thornton, a free agent, wants to play another two years. His preference is to play in Boston, so the sense is that if the Bruins will have him back, he’ll return. If they don’t want him, he won’t. Chiarelli told Thornton that he needs to look at some things before he decides whether the team will make him an offer.

“Thorty I thought had a kind of up and down year,” Chiarelli said. “He got, obviously, the incident with Pittsburgh and you know, there’s trends in hockey and the fisticuffs trend — again, this doesn’t characterize Thorty as just a fighter because he contributed on that [fourth] line.

“That line has had a lot of success in the past, but there is definitely, we’re trending away from that style. I had a discussion with Thorty this morning and I said, ‘Look, give me a couple weeks to digest what’s happened and then we’ll go from there.’ That same comment applies to [Jarome Iginla]. I haven’t talked to the other [unrestricted free agents] yet but to Iggy and Thorny so far.”

Iginla is a free agent as well. He played this season on a one-year deal in which the Bruins were able to pay him bonuses that will go against next year’s cap in order to save money on this year’s cap. The team can keep doing that on Iginla, but only on one-year deals.

Iginla, who tied for the team lead with 30 goals in the regular season and led the team with five postseason goals, said he does not wish to negotiate publicly, so he was generally tight-lipped about what he wants. He did say that at age 36, he still feels he can play a while longer.

“I still want to play for a while before I quit. I’ll push myself to be better and there are no issues,” he said. “I loved playing here with the guys and there’s a great chance for next year for the Stanley Cup. They keep getting better with the young guys that they have, Dougie [Hamilton] and [Matt Bartkowski]. The core is still young. There’s lots of reasons. Very fortunate if I can be back here.”

By Scott McLaughlin | Comments Off on Milan Lucic, David Krejci, Jarome Iginla fail to get going in Bruins’ Game 1 loss to Red Wings

Going into this series, it seemed like a pretty safe assumption that Patrice Bergeron and Pavel Datsyuk would match up frequently. Maybe you’d give the Bruins a slight edge there given that Datsyuk is coming back from an injury, but for the most part, you’d expect that to be a back-and-forth dogfight. Sure enough, that’s more or less how Game 1 played out — their lines went against each other pretty much every time out, and the matchup was essentially a wash until Datsyuk’s goal with 3:01 left in the game.

In theory, that matchup should have freed up the Bruins’ top line of Milan Lucic, David Krejci and Jarome Iginla to pick on Detroit’s lesser lines and banged-up defensive corps. That didn’t happen, though.

In fact, that line played one of its worst games of the season in Game 1. It went up against the trio of Gustav Nyquist, Riley Sheahan and Tomas Tatar for the majority of its shifts (thanks to shiftchart.com for the excellent data), and found itself chasing the puck most of the night. Lucic, Krejci and Iginla were able to get what should have been a favorable matchup against Detroit’s second pairing of Kyle Quincey and Danny DeKeyser — an OK, but far-from-great duo — for about half their shifts, but they never really got a chance to take advantage because of how much time they spent in their own zone.

A lot was made of Detroit’s speed going into the series, and this was really the one place that it showed. Nyquist and Tatar motored their way through the neutral zone and into the Bruins’ end time and again, with the back pressure from Krejci and company a little too late too often. From there, the cycle was on, as Boston’s top trio had to resort to chasing the puck rather than possessing it. When they did get it, they struggled to get through the neutral zone and sustain any sort of offensive pressure.

The result was Lucic, Krejci and Iginla all finishing with Corsi percentages under 40 (according to the fantastic extraskater.com), marking just the sixth time this season their possession numbers as a line have dipped that low. In near perfect symmetry, Nyquist, Sheahan and Tatar all finished with Corsi percentages over 60. If the more basic shot on goal stat is your thing, Sheahan’s line had eight, while Krejci’s line had four. It is worth mentioning, however, that Krejci’s line had arguably the Bruins’ best chance all night when Lucic tipped an Iginla shot that wound up trickling just wide about 30 seconds before Datsyuk scored. Read the rest of this entry »